The patient presents chronic or acute pain, sometimes unbearable at the level of the joint with severe difficulty in the movement and elevation of the arm, even shaving or coming the hair may result impossible. One trait is the strong night pain radiated to the arm which, in some cases, makes the subject anxious and worried as if it were a heart attack.
In most cases, such a striking symptom id due to the rupture of the shoulder tendons that are commonly referred to as Rotator Cuffs.
The rupture of these tendons (i.e. the joints between muscle and bone that allows joint movement) may be due to trauma, but more often to alterations in the joint kinematics that over time causes a conflict between tendons and bone structures of the shoulder that can trigger pain.
A check up by the orthopaedic will be able to clarify the causes, reassuring the patient and excluding other pathologies (e.g. of cervical nervous origin) investigations to be performed are MRI and X-rays.